For those that weren't able to attend this year's PHP South Coast conference (in Portsmouth, UK) Matthew Setter has posted a wrap up of some of his experiences there and what the conference was like.

I’m on the train heading to Stansted airport, after what I can only describe as a brilliant weekend in Portsmouth, attending the inaugural PHP South Coast, conference. I’ve not been to Portsmouth for 10 years, but the wait was well worth it.

He talks about the venue where the conference was held and some of the talks that were given during the day long event. There were two tracks so, unfortunately, he wasn't able to attend all of the talks but he does provide summaries for those he was able to attend. He also spotlights the opening keynote from Cal Evans about the importance of community and how it relates to your career. He ends the post talking about something he found quite valuable: meeting people, both those he knew from online and others just attending the event.

With another round of "conference season" and Call for Papers starting up, there's some timely advice from Lorna Mitchell with some suggestions about submitting a talk to the conference of your choice.

I've been a conference speaker for a lot of years now, which doesn't make me an expert but it does mean that people ask me for advice pretty regularly! With the Call for Papers open for PHP North West at the moment (awesome conference, first weekend in October, CfP at http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw15/call-papers/), I've taken this question a few times. Here's my advice in a nutshell.

She shares five tips that she feels can help you make for a better abstract and submission including writing it down before submitting and asking for peer reviews before hitting that submit button. She also links to a few other helpful resources that can provide even more tips to help you even once you've been selected.

Peter Meth and Chris Hartjes, organizers of the popular Canadian PHP conference True North PHP have created a kickstarter for the latest generation of ehePHPants they hope can join the family - the woolly mammoth (complete with tusks and a nice fuzzy coat).

There's no arguing that people in the PHP community love their elephpants. The announcement of a new elephpant being available in a new colour sends people reaching for their wallets or using their network of connections to try and get one (or often more) for themselves.

As the True North PHP conference moves towards it's 4th edition we wanted to create our own unique elephpant to give away to attendees and allow others to obtain as well. So of course we thought of a Woolly Mammoth.

The kickstarter is only running for three more days, so if you'd like a chance to pick up a woolly mammoth elePHPant to call your own, be sure to head over and pledge for your package of choice. There's just a few days remaining and it's getting down to the wire. They won't get made unless the goal is met, so grab yours now!

Well we’ve already actually announced it at php[tek] 2015, but it’s time to start sharing some information about it. Yes, we are going to revive php[cruise], and once again host a conference-cruise for the PHP community. This 7 day cruise will take place from July 17-23, 2016 and leave from the port of Baltimore.

We still have lots of details to work out – but wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of this early! We will be working on making this a family friendly experience. Daycare/kids activities are included in the cost and we are even looking at scheduling some ‘teach kids to code’ type events.

As mentioned, this new event will be happening in July of 2016 with a tour around the Baltimore, Maryland area for a full seven days. There's currently not a site up for the event, this is just a preliminary announcement for those that didn't hear from the closing remarks at php[tek] this year.

With the PhpStorm IDE buzzing in modern PHP community, there are always many neat things to learn for better synergy with your every-day tool for web development. This session will give you an insight on 42 powerful tips and tricks that will make you more productive and efficient. From lightning-smart navigation to debugging and testing hidden tricks, from making UI of the IDE even more suitable for presentations to some handy tools integrations - all of those tips will find a good use in your development workflow.

You can watch the video of the full presentation over on YouTube. The video is a full-on screencast so you get to see every move he makes including special keystrokes, general IDE functionality, settings changes and built in tools like a REST client and integration with other external tools.

The PHP UK Conference has just posted videos of all the 2015 sessions over on YouTube. The PHP UK Conference this year was a two-day event in London that featured some of the best speakers and sessions the PHP community has to offer. Videos posted include:

This episode Adam Culp announces the winner, David Stockton (Colorado), of the contest launched in Run Geek Radio episode 004. [...] Adam also talks briefly to clarify his views on “soft talks” versus “soft skills talks”, and how he was misrepresented as disliking soft skills talks though the opposite is true. [...] Then this episode is rounded out with a detailed coverage of time estimation in relation to projects, and why it is so vitally important to be accurate. Adam also speaks about how important proper requirements gathering is to the process.

In keeping with the cross-community theme, they've gathered speakers from the general PHP, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Zend Framework, Symfony and CakePHP communities together in one place. Sessions at this year's event include:

"HTTPS is Coming: Are You Prepared?"

"Test, Create, Secure, Repeat"

"Scrummy Bums: Adventures in Agile Process"

"Using Lessons Learned to Create Web-Manageable Symfony Apps"

"Invented Here: Migrating Legacy Data to Drupal 8"

"Magento 2 Dependency Injection, Interceptors, and You"

"Dev Divas: Amazing Women Who Shaped Computer Tech"

There's also keynotes from well known community members Andrew Nacin, Tessa Mero, Lorna Mitchell and Taylor Otwell. You can see the full lineup here and, if you want to pick up tickets of your own, you can do it directly from the site.

The Pacific Northwest PHPConference, happening later this year in Seattle, Washington, has officially announced their speakers for this inaugural event.

Thank you so much for your submissions to our CfP for the Pacific Northwest PHP (PNWPHP) Conference. We received over 250 submissions from which we had to select less than 30 to fit into the PNWPHP program.

It was hard to choose. There were so many high-quality proposals, but ultimately we made the tough decisions to make sure we included the talks and speakers that we thought would create the best conference program for our audience here in the Pacific Northwest, while also staying within our budget.

Among those slated to speak are several well-known PHP community speakers like Adam Culp, Beau Simensen, Cal Evans, Davey Shafik and Jeremy Mikola. They've also listed out the sessions and their summaries too. You can pick up your tickets now, but act quickly - the Early Bird pricing ends at the end of June!

The Full Stack Radio podcast has posted their latest episode today, episode #17, hosted by Adam Wathan and featuring guest Adam Culp. Adam and Adam talk about ways you can maximize your conference experience.

n this episode, Adam talks to Adam Culp, organizer of Sunshine PHP and ZendCon. They talk about how to get into conference speaking, how to make the most of a conference as an attendee, as well as tips for running a great local user group.